Money-back guarantee … for law school?

Yale Law Professors Ian Ayres and Akhil Reed Amar probably did well in school, and they have good jobs.

But not everyone fares so well, and many students graduate with little chance of earning enough to pay their loans.

To give the less successful law student a more appealing way out, the two professors have suggested that schools offer students half of their first-year tuition back if the students drop out after year one, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. [The article can only be read by CHE subscribers.]

The idea is to create an incentive to balance the forces of inertia that often pull students down a path that is not leading where they thought.

As reality sets in, Ayres and Amar suggest, law schools should provide a gentle nudge and parting gift, especially if the schools are not up front about the earning potential of graduates.

Who doesn’t like options? Some law students, it turns out.

Pausing on her way out of Suffolk Law School today, 1L Ashlee Mastrangelo said she didn’t care for the Yale Law professors’ proposal.

“A lot of people really want to go to law school, and I would hate for this to become an incentive for people who were not really sure to make that competitive pool even bigger,” she said.

One comment

Too many people are going to law school. I read somewhere that it was estimated that by 2035, at current rates of increase in law school admissions, if things don’t change, we will all be lawyers. Perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but we do seem to have an overabundance. That’s why the plumber and the auto-tech people are living on Park Place and the lawyers are increasingly struggling to secure a place on Baltic Ave.